them willing me well again.
All around me, on the walls, there were photographs. From where I lay, I thought I could recognise Kezia and Lorenzo in some of them, as children. There were other people in the photographs I did not know, other family, I supposed. But many of the photographs were of animals: herds of black bulls and white horses, some sheep too. Most though were of flamingos, large and small, and these were all in colour: flamingos flying across the sky in great flocks, or landing on the water, or standing alone and majestic in the marshes, or sitting on nests, or feeding in the shallows. I longed to be able to get up and look more closely. But I was still too weak to do it on my own. Even going to the toilet, I still needed one of them to steady me, to help me walk across the room.
But I could already feel myself getting better. I did not shiver any more, nor break into cold sweats. I slept less and my energy was beginning to return. I was feeling stronger with every day that passed. I wanted to test my legs, my balance, get myself moving. I was beginning to wander about the room, peer out of the windows, look at the photographs close up, all the while trying to make more sense of my surroundings. The room where I had been lying night and day on my couch was cavernous, with a high, heavily beamed ceiling. It was living room, kitchen, eating room all in one, and sparsely furnished – just my couch, a few chairs, a small table, a blanket for Ami by the fire. Everything was huddled close around the open fireplace, which was the glowing, crackling heart of the room.
There was a small kitchen in one corner, where Kezia was often busy over the stove, or the sink, and beyond the kitchen was the door to the bathroom, the only other room I’d been into. A staircase in the darkest corner of the room led upstairs to where Kezia and Lorenzo went each night, leaving Ami and me to the flickering warmth of the fire. There was no electricity in the house, so far as I could see. The house smelled of oil lamps and burning wood, and of whatever Kezia happened to be cooking on the stove. She made the best soups I had ever tasted, mostly vegetable soups, with potatoes or rice, and there was always bread, crusty, chewy, not at all like the bread at home. I loved it.
Outside, the wind often raged and roared about the house, and, when it did, it was continuous, unrelenting, for a week or more sometimes, and with such ferocity that the house shook. So loud was this wind, this mistral, as Kezia called it, that it was difficult to think straight at all, and sometimes impossible to hear what Kezia was saying in her still, small voice. Lorenzo I could hear better, despite the mistral, because he would often repeat the same word louder and louder for me. But understanding him was difficult. If ever I looked perplexed – and I was often perplexed – he would act out what he meant, which I could see he loved to do. But, even then, much of what he was trying to tell me was beyond my comprehension.
“Flam flam” was one of the things he said that needed no explanation. He spoke it more than any other, and it sometimes provoked in him an extraordinary metamorphosis. “Flam flam,” he would say, and, on the spur of the moment, he would become a flamingo, a living, breathing flamingo, stepping out in long, slow, stiff strides across the room, leaning forward, his neck stretched out, bending to feed, scooping through the shallows, just as I had seen them out on the lakes in the marshes. Then his arms would suddenly open up and become wings, and he would be flying, soaring around the room. Whenever he did this, I would marvel at how such a large man, often so awkward in his mannerisms and movements, could glide about the room with such balletic grace, honking happily, a complete flamingo.
But there were so many other words he kept saying that I could not yet understand at all. He seemed to think that by repeating them louder, his face closer to mine, it might help me understand. I could sense his frustration and disappointment when I did not. So sometimes I would resort to pretending that I knew what he was talking about. But I don’t think I ever fooled him. And anyway I sensed that he did not like me pretending. When she was there, Kezia would often see my difficulty and come to my rescue, interpreting for me. But she was not always around. So the meaning of many of his words remained a mystery to me.
“Rousel”, “grette”, “Capo”, “Val”, “Lot Lot” – these were just some of the words that he used, many of them quite often, words he clearly longed for me to understand. I could see he liked it when I repeated the words back to him. That was what made him happy. So that’s what I did. He liked me to be an echo. And I also learned early on with Lorenzo that he liked truth, that for him pretending between people, unless it was for fun, was not truthful, and that upset him.
It took a while for me to begin to understand this strange, awkward man, who seemed to live so much of every day in a world of his own. He was like no one I had ever encountered before. He joined our world – the real world as we like to think of it – and left it as and when he felt like it. Everything he did was both spontaneous and meant. His words and his ways were his own. I was getting used to his language, his moaning, or groaning, or humming, to his sudden shrieks and shouts of exuberance, his bursts of laughter and clapping. I noticed that Ami, if he could, would follow Lorenzo everywhere he went, walking at his heels. Unlike me, he seemed to understand every word Lorenzo spoke, every gesture and grunt. Kezia too, I could see, understood him instinctively. I envied the closeness between the three of them, the complete understanding and trust. I felt an outsider sometimes, but they never treated me as such.
Lorenzo had his own way of ending the day. He would be gone for an hour or so out on the farm, saying goodnight to the animals in his hospital, I presumed, or patrolling the marshes, looking for waifs and strays. When he came in, he rarely sat down at all, even to eat, but liked to stay in the room with us while we did. He would stand, watching the fire in silence, usually nibbling on a piece of sausage – he ate almost nothing else but sausage. When the moment came that he decided to go to bed, it always took me by surprise, even though I was expecting it. He would turn away from us, stop to crouch down for a while over Ami, touch him on his head, give him the last of his sausage, then, with a wave of his hand, walk very deliberately towards the stairs. As he went, he would lift his arms, make wide beating wings of them, and make his way upstairs, honking his farewell.
Kezia and I would sit and talk by the fire, or sit together for a while in comfortable silence. I was by now much less tired than I had been.
There was so much I wanted to ask her, about Lorenzo especially, but also about the photographs on the walls too, who everyone in them was, how the two of them had come to be living here together. I had asked her once about how she had learned to speak English, but still she had not told me. I was longing to find out. I was intrigued about everything, and I knew that time was short. Now I was up and about a bit more – though I was not yet allowed outside in that wind – I would soon have to think about leaving. I did not want to have to say goodbye before finding answers to all the whys and wherefores in my head.
I had asked her more than once as well about the photographs on the walls, who everyone was, but Kezia simply said they were family, and would say nothing else. I felt that to ask again might be to intrude and upset her, and, after all she and Lorenzo had done for me, I did not want to do that.
As it turned out, I never had to ask her at all. One evening, as we were sitting there by the fire, just after Lorenzo had gone up to bed, Kezia started asking me questions. “Alors, Vincent. You must tell me something about yourself,” she said suddenly, quite unexpectedly. “In England, en Angleterre, where do you live? Have you any brothers or sisters at home? I know nothing about you. What have you been studying,
